What unites the work in this mammoth exhibition is the seemingly unshakeable faith in the optical that nearly every picture demonstrates. Not here will you find the contemporary suspicion of the image, or of the manipulative and coercive nature of the photographic exchange. Instead this work demonstrates a striking brashness, an apparent belief that the world can be understood by depicting it; further, that it can be changed by seeing it in a new way. However foolhardy such confidence in pictorial progress may seem now, looking back from an age battered by mass media, these pictures remain stirring, and touching in their optimism. Linking pictorial exploration with psychological and societal growth, the artists represented here were able to produce formal innovations that remain startling today in their expressive freedom, and that at the time must have carried the added charge of articulating